Hey everyone,

Here’s a NEW rendered image of my Chopper. I decided to put together a full ‘illustration’ of the Chopper instead of just the simple render from Maya. I think it looks much better now.

-Kev

Hey everyone,

I’ve started a sketch blog. I created this so that I can keep up my drawing and sketching on a daily basis. The idea is to draw something new every day, or even more than one thing if I have the time. I want to use it to try different things, different styles, different designs etc etc. I just want to draw!

Check it out here:

Later,

-Kev

Hey all,

I’ve been playing around with Mental Ray lately, in order to try and polish up my rendering skills. Mental Ray is one of those beasts I’ve been resisting taming for many years now. Previous attempts just frustrated me with how slow it can be to use, and granted, if you know what you’re doing it goes a bit quicker. Not that I’ve reached that point by any means, but I feel a bit more comfy using it now after playing with it a bit more lately. Anyways, here’s the results of my recent tests, and I think they came out very nicely. Because I’ve used my Chopper model for these tests I’ve replaced most of the renders of the Chopper in my portfolio.

Take car everyone,

-Kev

Well, not really. But the place hosting the website did have an explosion of sorts, so if you’ve been trying to view this website of mine, but couldn’t, now you know why. Here’s the reason they gave me:

Hi Kevin

Saturday evening at 4:55 in the Houston data centre where the Rose server is located, an electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no servers were damaged or lost and the data is still safely on the server.

All members of the support team are in, and all vendors who supply the data center equipment are on site. The initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday CDT. Rest assured the support team are working around the clock.

There is no impact in any of our other servers. As we are unable to currently access the back-up systems we are unable to restore your account to another server but if you have a back-up copy of your site on your local machine we would be able to create an account for you on another server and for you to re-upload your data to this server.

We do hope that during the next few hours access to the server will be regained as the team reinstate power to the affected servers.

We are sorry that this accident has occurred and apologize for the impact.

Best Regards,

NetPivotal Team

Anyways. The project that I’ve been working on, and have now finished working on, was aired on Saturday, on BBC2, which was really cool to see. The show is called ‘Meta4orce‘, and if you click on the link it will take you to the BBC website where you can view the first episode, as well as play games related to that first episode.

There will be three more episodes, each with there own unique games related to the episode. I didn’t have anything to do with the games themselves, besides providing a few renders, but my contribution was to the series itself. I was responsible for pretty much all of the external shots, which required the modeling and texturing of a flooded London city, with a few major landmarks, as well as new buildings, different areas of London (such as slum area), vehicles etc etc. I also animated these shots, which was all camera and vehicle animation, no characters. The characters were animated in After Effects. Considering the short amount of time, and small budget, that this series had, I think it turned out quite nicely. I started work at the end of January and completed work at the beginning of May, and produced well over a hundred shots, besides all of the modeling and texturing, just to give you an idea on what had to be done with the limitations we had.

It was a great experience working on this project, with some really nice people, at a great company, Bloc Media. Bloc Media owns Meta4orce, and were responsible for producing the series itself. Bloc also created the games for the series, something the company does on a regular basis for other clients and websites.

So go check out Meta4orce!

I’m on to a new project now, which probably won’t be as long as the Meta4orce gig, but looks like fun to do. I am on the lookout for more freelance work, so if you need a good 3d artist that wants to work on more animation projects, then feel free to get in contact with me.

Take care folks,

-Kev

A small update with the ‘Duke’ model.

-Kev

I decided to take a small break from the Duke Mudbox model to work on something a little more ‘realistic’. Since we’re currently working our way through Lost season 3 here at home, these characters have been on my mind and I decided Locke would be an interesting character to sculpt in Mudbox. Luckily there’s fairly good reference on the web for Lost, so it was easy enough finding good images. This is as far as I got today:

Take care,

-Kev

Here are two more sets of screen grabs for ‘Duke’, my Mudbox model. I spent a bit of time working on his hair, and I think it turned out okay.

-Kev

I’ve updated a couple of the galleries. The 3d character gallery had been updated along with the 3d objects gallery with this image:

-Kev

Here’s an update on my Mudbox model. This is proving to be quite a challenge, which 3d can normally be, especially if you’re trying to turn a 2d image into 3d. This has the added difficulty of being a caricature of a real person, and the initial 2d image has all of it’s ‘caricature characteristics’ for THAT pose in the 2d image.

It’s challenging, but totally fun and enjoyable as well.

-Kev

Thought I would share with you all what I am currently working on. It’s being done in Mudbox, an awesome piece of software for sculpting in 3d. I played with a demo copy a couple months back but didn’t really do much, so this is my first actual attempt at a Mudbox model. The image I am using for this piece is a caricature of a famous actor by my favorite caricature artist, Sebastian Krüger. I am really enjoying using Mudbox, it feels so nice to use and makes sculpting in 3d an enjoyable, fun thing to do. Hopefully I can buy a copy at some point (I’m using a 30 day demo copy), as now that I’m working with Mudbox, I just wanna carry on going, the possibilities are endless.

I’ll post more images as I get further along.

-Kev